This episode was recorded 2016-12-29 in Hamburg. We had a short chat with Ryan Taylor (@AdjyLeak), zooko (@zooko) and Meredith L Patterson (@maradydd) at 33c3.

In this short episode Zooko tells us a cute story of practical love letters hidden in blockchain transactions, Meredith highlights the importance of compilers in the world and Ryan mentions Alexandria library. It’s a bit of a teaser for the 2017, as some of it we will be covering in detail in 2017 on Oktahedron.

Thanx to Tim Pritlove for recommending Sendecentrum, instead of dragging all our audio equipment all the way to the Congress from Berlin, thanx to Chistopher who was so patient & helpful, and other guys at Sendecentrum . And a great big thanx to our wonderful sound guy in particular.

This episode is about Secure Scuttlebutt – a database of unforgeable append-only feeds, optimized for efficient replication for peer to peer protocols. Brought to you by @dirkjaekel@j32804 and our guest @dominictarr

Would a dumber (not a Turing complete) language would make smart contracts smarter (easily verifiable)? We talk about total functional languages and alternatives to accounts-based model. Should we look at the blockchain as a pure data store, possibly equipped with primitives such as map/reduce or similar?

In this episode @heckerhut, @dirkjaeckel and @j32804 amongst other things discuss legal stuff in the universe of blockchains. Non of it can be considered legal advice. As an anonymous friend of mine put it: blockchain is a hot new cool thing for borderline legal shenanigans. Is it?

Some time passed after the DAO has goxed. We will need to mention it again, because it raised a lot of legal questions. What has happened since?

We also discuss crowdsales, smart contract which went bonkers (not the DAO one), reference to other podcasts touching on topics of law and regulations (see links below) and making predictions without regard to the possibility of danger involved in it. Here is a selection os links to articles and topics we have mentioned:

Sian Jones gave some regulatory update on Epicenter Bitcoin. EU regulations are not so restrictive towards fintech / virtual currency businesses? But what about crowdsales?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F-Z3rlOapk

We have also mentionned that it might be safer to use other than Turing complete languages for smart contracts, because Turing complete ones are inherently undecidable, which makes it impossible to know what a “smart contract” will do before running it.

This year EU Parliament published some stuff on virtual currencies. They are usually little bit behind the curve – while people are discussing the DAOs they are getting their heads around bitcoin. But hopefully EU people will be catching up fast.

We were unsure what to think ourselves, whether to support or oppose the idea of either a soft or a hard fork. First feeling was to oppose the hard fork, as it undermines the idea of the immutability of the block chain. But after researching the topic more we could consider it as a good solution.

Statement in support of soft fork and rather heated discussion whether it will compromise the whole idea of the immutable blockchain: